Thinking about it made my stomach clench.
“You’re quiet tonight.” Tyler sat at the stall next to mine, already half dressed. “Everything good?”
“Yeah, fine. Just focused.”
“Focused is good. We need focused. Boston’s been playing out of their minds lately.”
“We’re better.”
“Obviously, but it’s still gonna be a fight.” Tyler grinned, then clarified. “The fun kind, not the kind to make the trainers wince.”
I pulled on my base layer and tried to push everything except hockey out of my brain.
This was what I was good at. This was what made sense.
The ice, the puck, the simple clarity of competition.
No confusing feelings, no questions I couldn’t answer.
Just the game.
Coach stuck his head in around 6:30, gave his usual pre-game speech about playing our game and trusting the system, then disappeared to do whatever coaches did before puck drop.
The music got louder.
The energy ramped up.
By the time we filed into the tunnel for warmups, we were a coiled spring ready to, well, do whatever the fuck springs did.
The arena was sold out, 19,000 strong, a sea of blue and white that roared when we hit the ice. Young boys and girls screamed and banged the glass; our sticks slammed the ice, returning their salutes. I did my usual lap, letting the noise wash over me, feeling the familiar surge of adrenaline that never got old no matter how many times I experienced it.
This was home.
This was where I belonged.
For the next three hours, nothing else mattered.
Tyler had been right. The game was a war.
Boston came out swinging, scoring twice in the first period on goals that made me want to break my stick over my knee. We answered with one of our own before the intermission, but it wasn’t enough. We were playing catch-up, always a step behind, and Coach’s face during the break looked like a thundercloud about to unleash holy hell.
“We’re better than this,” he said, pacing in frontof the whiteboard. “We’re faster, we’re smarter, and we want it more. Start fucking acting like it!”
And so we did.
The second period was a different story.
Murph scored on a beautiful redirect that had the arena shaking. Tyler followed up five minutes later with a wrister from the slot that beat their goalie clean.
3 to 2, Lightning.
Then Boston tied it up with two minutes left in the period, and we went into the third knotted at 3.
The final twenty minutes were chaos.
Both teams traded chances, both goalies stood on their heads, penalties were nonexistent as the refs let us play.
And the crowd?
